i’m shocked. shocked.
Oh look, some evidence that inflammatory claims in something written by Satoshi Kanazawa may not rest on the deep structure of reality or spring from his special ability to speak uncomfortable truths, but may instead arise from an inability to analyze AddHealth data properly. I for one am stunned.
The Psychology Today article makes a very nice point concerning the extra responsibilities scientists have for studying topics that may cause harm (such as findings supporting racism). This is something that management scholars might bear in mind too.
Research needs to be speculative and no individual study and create conclusive and certain findings. Yet, if our studies would actually shape what organizations or governments do, these changes would be detrimental to some (akin all interventions recommended by economists decrease someone’s wellbeing). It is in practice an entirely different thing to study why some nations have highes propensity of leukemia and why some nations have higher average IQ irrespective of what the results are.
Along these lines, I think we should have different standards of robustness for studies that purport to prescribe managerial choices and those that seek to merely develop theory. To require similar standards is to either stiffle theoretical developments or to make potentially detrimental recommendations.
Henri
May 23, 2011 at 7:23 am
@Henry, if journals demand greater rigor for studies which aspire to informing decision-making, then we will discourage such research which would be unfortunate. I would prefer that we merely set up institutions such that researchers are expected, and incentivized, to reveal all the assumptions or weaknesses of their own research.
Michael Bishop
May 23, 2011 at 4:33 pm
I am bothered by the parts of this that seem to give claims and theories about differences in attractiveness the same moral and policy gravity as those about differences in intelligence. It’s well-intentioned, I know, but nonetheless still trivializes an enormously complicated set of issues regarding cognitive abilities and a very ugly part of the history–and contemporary–of American racial stratification.
jeremy
May 23, 2011 at 5:06 pm
Yeah, I know. I figured this was about as good as it was going to get from within the ambit of Psychology Today.
Kieran
May 23, 2011 at 5:25 pm
Jeremy: my own rank order is the same as yours, i.e. intelligence is more important than attractiveness as a social basis for assessment. But you underestimate the power and significance of attractiveness ratings, possibly (and I don’t mean to essentialize here) because you have not been raised as female in this society, where like it or not, all women are repeatedly provided external assessments of our attractiveness, whether we like it or not, and whether intellectually we think they matter or not. This stuff causes enormous amounts of anguish and internalized self-hate unless you have a lot of character to push back against it. And I’m speaking as White woman who was never defined as generally attractive. The idea of not being socially defined as attractive comes up often in writings by Black women and is a source of a great deal of psychic pain.
In addition, there is I believe a non-trivial amount of research that says that subjective “attractiveness” ratings influence the acquisition of material and social resources like jobs and raises, controlling for such factors as intelligence. Am I wrong on this?
olderwoman
May 23, 2011 at 5:34 pm
I’m shocked that the LSE would pay Kanazawa’s salary after the man has been exposed time after time as a hack.
http://itisonlyatheory.blogspot.com/2011/05/evolutionary-psychology-or-open-racism.html
Jon
May 23, 2011 at 5:48 pm
OW: Hey! Remember a little thing you may have heard about recently called the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study? I’m the one who supervised the graduate student project to get attractiveness ratings of yearbook photos. Yielding, incidentally, data with better measurement properties than Add Health. So, don’t think I underestimate the importance of attractiveness in life.
But, e.g., you don’t have Arthur Jensen writing an essay in the 1960s about how compensatory education was a waste of resources because some folks are just innately uglier than others.
jeremy
May 23, 2011 at 5:57 pm
There’s a good post on scientific american on this as well:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=the-datas-in-satoshi-kanazawa-is-a-2011-05-23
Shamus Khan
May 23, 2011 at 6:32 pm
You’re right, Jeremy, we agree. But I think you went overboard in saying that worrying about attractiveness measures is trivializing the ugly issues around intelligence measurement.
olderwoman
May 24, 2011 at 3:18 am